The present invention generally relates to formulas and formatting applied to cells in an electronic spreadsheet. More particularly, the present invention relates to the detection in an electronic spreadsheet of a list of cells having consistent formulas and/or formatting and extension of said formulas and/or formatting to include a cell appended to or edited within said list.
Electronic spreadsheets organize information into a matrix of columns and rows. Each column within a row is referred to as a cell. Each cell of an electronic spreadsheet stores a data element or a formula that uses data elements from other cells to calculate a desired result. As an example, a formula may be used to calculate the sum of data elements stored in the cells comprising a column or a row of an electronic spreadsheet. To ease computation, electronic spreadsheets include built-in functions that perform most standard mathematical operations.
For on-screen viewing and printed output, electronic spreadsheets may also include functionality to apply a variety of formatting options to a cell. Exemplary formatting options include: font face, color, size and style; border style and color; background color; conditional formatting rules; etc. Formatting may usually be accomplished per cell or per a group of cells. Thus, a typical electronic spreadsheet may include a variety of different formats at any given time.
Prior electronic spreadsheets require a user to manually apply formulas and/or formatting to selected cells through commonly known user interface techniques, such as selecting options from a pull-down menu. Skilled users of such prior systems may also take advantage of built-in short-cuts, such as copy/paste functions, to extend formulas and/or formatting to include newly selected cells. In particular, shorts-cuts have proven effective for extending formulas and/or formatting to include cells that are appended to or edited within a list of cells having a consistent formula or format or aggregating formulas. However, short-cuts do not eliminate the need for manual user interaction in order to extend formulas and/or formatting. Thus, a significant drawback found in prior electronic spreadsheets is the inability to automatically extend, without instruction from the user, a formula or format to include a cell that is appended to or edited within a list of cells.
Accordingly, there is a need for an electronic spreadsheet that is able to recognize a list of cells having a consistent formula and/or formatting and/or aggregating formulas applied thereto and to automatically extend such consistent formula and/or formatting and/or aggregating formulas to include a cell that is appended to or edited within the list.
The present invention fulfills the needs in the art by providing an electronic spreadsheet with functionality for automatically extending, without user instruction, formulas and/or formatting to include new cells. Since the present invention extends formatting and formulas without user instruction to do so, care is taken to insure that the user would desire such an operation. Thus, the present invention only automatically extends formatting and formulas to include cells that appear to be extensions of or within existing lists of cells having consistent formulas or formatting applied thereto. A list is defined herein as a number of successive cells, in a row or a column, having a consistent data type. A previously blank newly edited cell is an extension of a list if it also has the consistent data type. Once an extension of a list is identified, the list is examined for consistent formatting and/or formulas and/or aggregating formulas. If the list has consistent formatting, the consistent formatting is automatically applied to the previously blank newly edited cell. If a first consistent formatting exists in a column list and a second consistent formatting exists in a row list, the first formatting of the column list may be given priority and applied to the previously blank newly edited cell. List-related formulas may exist in two forms: first, a number of the rows above the previously blank newly edited cell may have the same formula, with all supporting rows filled in on the same row as the previously blank newly edited cell, applied thereto; and second, an aggregating formula may reference a number of the cells in the list. If either of these types of formulas are detected they are automatically updated to include the previously blank newly edited cell.